Henry W. Longfellow

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WERE half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts:

The warrior’s name would be a name abhorred!
And every nation that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead
Would wear for evermore the curse of Cain!Henry W. Longfellow

CAN anything in the world be of so great concern as to provoke us to war, a thing so calamitous and so hateful, that even when it is most righteous no truly good man can approve it . . . . And if you count the cost you will see how, even if you conquer, you lose much more than you gain. What kingdom can you set against the lives and blood of so many thousand men? And yet the greatest amount of the mischief affects those who have no part in the fighting. The advantages of peace reach everybody; while in war, for the most part, even the conqueror weeps; and it is followed by such a train of calamities that there is good reason in the fiction of the poets, that War comes to us from Hell and is sent by the Furies.Desiderius Erasmus

WAR is the greatest of crimes, when it is not waged for the benefit of mankind, for the sake of a great truth to enthrone, or a great lie to entomb.Joseph Mazzini

ALL noble souls through dust and heat
Rise from disaster and defeat the stronger;
And conscious still of the divine
Within them, lie on earth supine no longer.Henry W. Longfellow

THE only knowledge that can really make us better is not of things and their laws, but of persons and their thoughts; and I would rather have an hour’s sympathy with one noble heart than read the law of gravitation through and through.James Martineau

WE do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of Nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.Ralph Waldo Emerson

OUR estimate of human nature is in proportion to the best specimen of it we have witnessed.Sir John Seeley

NO man securely doth command but he that hath learned readily to obey.Thomas A Kempis

AN infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men.John Ruskin

WHERE’ER a noble deed is wrought,
Where’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts in glad surprise
To higher levels rise;
The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares
Out of all meaner cares.Henry W. Longfellow

EGOTISM erects its centre in itself: love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr’s crown—indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.John C. F. von Schiller

O HOW unblest are they who have fallen into an incapacity to admire, and bid adieu to the Bolace of a deep reverence; who can take up without awe the leaves scattered on the earth by departed genius, or read of the struggles of liberty without enthusiasm, or follow the good in their pilgrimage of mercy without the heavings of a mighty joy! No grief deserves such pity as the hopeless privations of a scornful heart.James Martineau